With recent social progresses and technological development, more and more people are using mobile terminals to wirelessly access the network to obtain information. In the conventional web page browsing process, the user clicks on the current page to advance to a linked page, which is then loaded in real-time. However, for current ways of accessing the network through mobile terminals, especially mobile phones, because the limitations on the terminal hardware and the network interface, it might be inevitable for the user to spend 10 to 20 seconds waiting for the web page loading process, from clicking on loading the next page to completing the loading. This process may waste certain amount of the user's time and consume the user's patience. To deal with this situation, the web page pre-reading technology becomes increasingly widely-used.
For pre-reading web pages, in general the existing technologies use the following approach:
Based on historical browsing behavior of the user of the client terminal and web page layout, the server predicts which files need to be pre-loaded. When the user is browsing web pages, the web page pre-reading function can be realized by pre-loaded files. Thus, the user does not need to wait for the pages to be loaded and can quickly obtain the page contents that need to be loaded from the server.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,284,035 (B2) discloses a similar technical solution: determining certain sub-pages of a web page are obtained by the user; if it is determined, pre-reading these determined sub-pages, and the preference of the sub-pages are generated by analyzing web pages previously visited by the user. Factors used by such analysis may include the user's visiting history of sub-pages of a particular web page, number of days of the past visit, and how many sub-pages on the current page, etc. For example, when a user visits a same news site every morning and always reads articles from the politics, computer, travel, and reading columns, according to this patent application, when the news web pages were visited, these preferences will be determined, and those articles related to the politics, computer, travel, and reading columns will have higher priority than those from other columns and be loaded into the browser's cache.
However, with the existing technology, after the pre-reading of specific sub-pages, the user still needs to perform flipping operations on the sub-pages to obtain these sub-pages one by one from the cache on the client side. To the user who needs to browse the web pages with many sub-pages (such as a serial novel), although the pre-reading can reduce the user's waiting time to a certain extent, the frequent flipping operations may be still inconvenient for continuous browsing experience.
Chinese Patent Application No. 200910313007.8 discloses a web page pre-reading and integrated browsing system and application method for mobile communication terminal equipment. It uses a pre-reading module for reading sub-pages of the current web page in advance, and a web page integrating module for combining the current web page and the sub-pages into a combined web page. The pre-read page can be searched at multiple levels, and the obtained sub-pages are combined with the current web page to create an integrated web page displayed to the user, improving the user's browsing experience.
However, the pre-reading and integrating scheme disclosed by this Chinese Patent Application No. 200910313007.8 can only use a simple keyword on the web page such as “The Next Page”, “The Next Chapter”, or “The Next Section” as the hot point to trigger obtaining and combining relative sub-pages. For web pages with complex sub-page structures (such as serial novels with both “The Next Page” and “The Next Chapter” links), it may be unable to achieve accurate pre-reading. Further, this Chinese Patent Application No. 200910313007.8 uses a single pre-read rule, may be lack of consideration on the user's browsing preferences, and may be less user friendly.